The first time I ever met Patricia was on a “Way of the Warrior” workshop being run in Whitesands, South Africa.
I have no idea how the email about it ended up in my inbox – but it did. And, reading it – I knew I had to go. There was also a “Footsteps of the Soul – facilitator training,” happening not long after that. I had no idea what that involved, but, booked on to that too though it didn’t call me as strongly as the Warrior training did at the time…
I had no idea what I was in for!
I gave up my job (my bosses said they’d keep it open for me anyway “just in case”), gave up my room in the shared house where I was living, packed my bags and flew from the UK to South Africa with the intention of starting over once again back in SA….
Patricia looked at me when I first walked in, and said “You do realise you’re not finished in the UK don’t you? I run this traning in the UK too you know… You still have work to do there, you are going to have to go back…”
Good thing my bosses had kept my job open for me after all, because she was right.
When I think back to that person, who signed up to those two trainings around 20 years ago now, it is like recalling a different lifetime. I tell stories of that time – and can hardly remember that young woman. I was both so terrified and so brave at the same time! But I was also shaped by trauma and by fear, struggling with a back injury that doctors had predicted would put me in a wheelchair before I was 30…. – And my pattern was to either run from what I was most afraid of – or throw myself into whatever situation or relationship caused me the most fear in order to confront the fear and over come it… Because, confronting it – that was where the adrenalin charge was, and that adrenalin left me feeling alive…
On the outside, I appeared to be confident, outgoing and cheerful. Internally, I constantly doubted myself, and was incredibly shy. It was a marvellous act that I put on – this confidence.
I was scared of my own dreams, and didn’t believe in my ability to create them. In spite of so many marvellous, magical synchronicities! The things which really mattered to me, I was often too scared to do, not trusting myself to be safe in following those. Or, I’d throw myself into doing them with no practical support or long term plan… It was great fun – and it has taken me into so many adventures…
From a young age, I have seen Spirit, seen energy around people – but not understood it what I was seeing. And so I tried to block it off, shutting down that side of me – until I became ill and learnt to begin opening to it, learning to work with and apply it.
I trusted Spirit, I trusted my guides and mostly, I trusted the sense I had of where the connection I had with them was taking me. But I also wanted it to make sense. I wanted my seeing and sensing to be practical!
There was such a split between my internal landscape and my ability to see and feel Soul and Spirit, and how my life was playing out, especially with regards to relationships. I just didn’t completely trust when good things were happening, constantly waiting for the bad thing to happen instead! If anything, I actually felt happier when bad things happened – because that was expected, and gave me something to push through and overcome…. In effect, that lack of trust and fear was acting to sabotague my own inner connection with Soul and the realisations of a life lived from that place of connection.
Sitting down to experience Transformational Healing the first time, I felt something click within me.
Here was a – IS – a technique which allows me to sit down with the fear – or the anger, or whatever emotion is surfacing in that moment. Or, in the times when I couldn’t feel the emotion because I’d learnt how to shut off from feeling too (that stuff was WAY too overwhelming), I could sit with the physical pain I was feeling instead. And, through sitting with it, and calling in my Soul, I could go beyond the feeling – pain, fear, anger, grief – dropping through all sorts of images, sensations – stuff that sometimes didn’t make sense in the context of my everyday life – until suddenly… There would be this A-ha moment where my Soul spoke to me, and the pain, or the fear, or whatever it was that I had gone into that space with, dissolved and disappeared….
And when I came out – I could move more easily, my body felt lighter, the light around me was brighter…. And something had eased.
Some part of me, that was telling a story of fear, anxt, pain, trauma – had dissolved and I was suddenly living with a bit less fear…
20 or so years later, I’m still not in a wheelchair, living life pain free as the mom of a growing young man, in the Highlands of Scotland, listening to my Soul, sharing the stories and encouraging others into their own Transformational Healing Journeys…